The Heritage Lottery Fund has launched a new £1 million grants programme called “All Our Stories” to support local projects across the UK that want to explore their local heritage.
A wide range of voluntary and community sector organisations (including charities, community groups, and heritage organisations) throughout the UK can apply for grants of between £3,000 and £10,000.
Funding will support activities which encourage exploring and learning about local heritage. Groups should be willing to share what they have learned with their community by doing things like holding a community event, performance, exhibition or producing a leaflet or designing a smart phone app or website, etc.
Activities that will be supported are:
- Visits to places like historic buildings, landscapes, parks, burial grounds, museums, archaeological sites or industrial heritage sites like railways.
- Using collections like archives, libraries and museums, including collections held by people in the community.
- Talking to people who know about heritage or holding workshops, talks and sessions exploring people’s memories.
- Recording things like people’s memories or local wildlife; scanning old photographs and documents; archaeological digs or surveying historic buildings.
Groups will be able to work with researchers from 21 universities and other educational organisations across the UK who will be available to support projects from the beginning of the application process as well as the research itself.
All Our Stories has been developed in support of the BBC’s The Great British Story – A People’s History, which is a new series to be broadcast on BBC Two. All Our Stories will also feature in five BBC Learning events at flagship heritage locations, which will be run in tandem with the TV series, to get people involved with their local heritage.
The deadline for applications is 31 July 2012 with a notification of decisions in October 2012
